Retailers, product manufacturers, or other commercial participants are often interested in hierarchies of products. Hierarchies can be organized in a variety of ways. For example, the inventory of a grocery store may include a category of beverages that contains sub-categories of sodas, flavored waters, juices, etc. Another grocery store with the same inventory may organize the beverage portion of its hierarchy differently. For example, the “beverage” category may contain sub-categories by manufacturer (e.g., COKE, PEPSI, etc.). Moreover, a chain of grocery stores may have a hierarchy that involves a high-level category related to store location, with lower-level categories involving product attributes, while yet another chain of grocery stores may have the reverse organization—high-level categories related to product attributes, with lower-level categories related to store location.
Hierarchies are useful to assist in performing analytic tasks. For example, a retailer or a product manufacturer may wish to assess the efficacy of a marketing campaign or the performance of a new line of products. Certain relevant analytic questions are often easier to formulate in the context of a hierarchy, such as examining sales of all products at a particular level in a hierarchy, or comparing performance of some aggregated products or brands to others.
Retailers, product manufacturers, or other commercial participants often have more than one hierarchy to describe the same collection of inventory. Moreover, as time progresses, it is often desirable to create new hierarchies (or modify existing hierarchies) to account for new products, new brands, new stores, new analytic questions, etc. Similarly, where data for different users are combined due to a sale or other change in a company, or where an existing product hierarchy is adapted to a new customer, various user-specific changes may be made without any need or desire to change the original hierarchy. Furthermore, the original hierarchy may have continuing utility to vendors or the like that supply data in a predetermined way to populate the hierarchy with data.
There remains a need for tools to permit end users to modify a hierarchy of information into a new hierarchy changing the underlying hierarchy from which the new hierarchy is derived.